What are ways of drafting a workflow document that maps elements in the design close to their counterparts in code?

Question

We're starting a medium sized PHP web app, written in MVC fashion, using CodeIgniter. Most of the functional specifications have been written, and there are a few features that will definitely be replaced with improved behaviour in later stages of the project.

I'm tasked with writing a workflow document from a technical point of view and here's what I want to cover, ideally:

• The document should preferably be a diagram of some sort,
• A close mapping of elements in the document with with models/views/controllers/js functions/other important blocks in the code; let's call these modules

That will suffice since I will be able to derive from that a way to test different modules independently and assign different modules to different programmers.

The aspect of rewriting parts of the document when I discover that parts of the code need to be replaced isn't an issue, I'll make the rewrites to keep code and diagram in sync if/when I have to.

My attempts so far with Petri nets and UML interaction diagrams have failed upon the realization that I have to expose too much of the decision making logic inside controllers.

I'm looking for advice and I'm curious if anyone has done this before.

Answer 1

I'm going to attempt an answer, although I'm not sure what you mean by "elements" in your question.

Bad ASCII art follows:

--------------                                      -----------------
|  element   | -------- is created by ------------  |    module     |
--------------                                      -----------------

--------------                                      -----------------
|  element   | -------- is modified by -----------  |    module     |
--------------                                      -----------------

Basically, element is acted upon by module(s). You could tie more than one module to an element.